Orbital ATK is wrapping up the final report into last October’s Antares launch failure for delivery to the Federal Aviation Administration, but has not indicated when the report will be released to the public.

Ohio’s U.S. Senate delegation ordered up an extensive report on the federal infrastructure required to produce both the nuclear batteries that power NASA missions to dark and distant corners of the solar system, and the plutonium isotope that fuels those batteries.

Russia has formally notified its International Space Station partners that it will continue in the partnership at least to 2024, ending several months of doubts that were fueled by the current poor state of Russia’s relations with the West.

While acknowledging delays in interim milestones for its two commercial crew contracts, NASA officials said July 28 they still require the full funding requested for 2016 to avoid delays in the overall program.

The accident that destroyed the SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle and killed one its pilots last year was caused by the co-pilot’s premature unlocking of the vehicle’s feathering system and inability of its developer, Scaled Composites, to foresee such an event and take measures to prevent it, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded July 28.

Mobile satellite communications services provider SpeedCast International on July 28 said it is purchasing SAIT Communications of Greece and Cyprus, a maritime communications provider with a 2,500-ship customer base.

Foreign nationals had access to restricted defense technology at NASA’s Ames Research Center in 2008 and 2009, but it is impossible to tell if they shared technical details about that technology with anyone overseas.

Contractors in the hunt to build the GPS satellites the U.S. Air Force will launch next decade are already touting their work on a fully digital navigation payload, an upgrade lawmakers want the Air Force to include when it finally places a follow-on order for the GPS 3 satellites now being built.